Mobile devices such as wireless communication devices providing voice communications, data communications or both in a wireless communication network are increasingly prevalent in modern society. Such devices may also provide additional personal digital assistant (PDA) functions such as a calendar, alarm, contact lists, calculators, etc. One common feature of such devices is a World Wide Web browser facility whereby a user may navigate web pages such as those made available through an intranet or the public Internet.
During a browsing experience, a web browser acquires web page data to render the web page on a display of the device. The web browser formulates requests for data using a protocol such as the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for requesting data from a web page server. In a wireless device, the requests and responses are typically communicated between the wireless device and the web page server through an intermediate server providing gateway services, bridging communications between the wireless network and the network of the web page server.
The gateway receives the requests from the wireless device and forwards them to the web server for service. Responses from the web server are received by the gateway and queued for communication to the wireless device.
To obtain the data for a single web page, a browser is often required to formulate more than one request. Occasionally, a response for a second request is required to be received and processed before the response for an earlier request is fully processed by the wireless device. When such a secondary HTTP request is made to the server while the communication of a response to an earlier request may be pending or in progress, the gateway sends any data that it has in its send queue until the entire response of the first request is completed. As a result, the web browser is delayed in receiving the response to the secondary request until it receives the entire response to the earlier request.
By way of an example, a browser of the wireless device may encounter a JavaScript™ source or cascading style sheet (css) reference in a response while loading a web page. Such references require immediate action. The browser is required to fetch the data for the reference, via a second request. It is also required to pause any further rendering of the page for any response data it may have until the new reference is completed. However, the send queue of the gateway may contain the remainder of the response to the first request while it receives the response to the second request. Send queues operate in accordance with first in first out (FIFO) rules. As such, the gateway puts the response to the second request at the end of its queue for sending after it completes the sending of the first response. Though such a manner of FIFO operation in a queue serializing response data is often desirable, it is apparent there are situations were a different ordering of communications may be required. When a secondary response requiring immediate action itself comprises a reference requiring immediate action, the delay experienced may be further compounded. As a result, a satisfying user experience may be affected. Web page loading times appear to lengthen when incomplete screens are displayed while waiting for additional data.
A solution to one or more of these shortcomings is therefore desired.